André Brock Jr.
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781479820375
- eISBN:
- 9781479811908
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479820375.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Black digital practice reveals a complicated mix of technological literacy, discursive identity, and cultural critique. Taken together, it offers glimpses of the multivalent Black communities’ ...
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Black digital practice reveals a complicated mix of technological literacy, discursive identity, and cultural critique. Taken together, it offers glimpses of the multivalent Black communities’ political, technocultural, and historical commonplaces to the outside world. These can be understood as three topoi shaping Black digital practice—ratchetry, respectability, and racism. This chapter examines ratchetry and racism as interlocking libidinal frames powering Black digital practice. Black digital practice, which the author once characterized as ritual drama and catharsis, can also be understood as digital orality—an online space encoded by folk culture and racial ideology, and undergirded by a libidinal discursive economy, producing pungent, plaintive commentary on matters political.Less
Black digital practice reveals a complicated mix of technological literacy, discursive identity, and cultural critique. Taken together, it offers glimpses of the multivalent Black communities’ political, technocultural, and historical commonplaces to the outside world. These can be understood as three topoi shaping Black digital practice—ratchetry, respectability, and racism. This chapter examines ratchetry and racism as interlocking libidinal frames powering Black digital practice. Black digital practice, which the author once characterized as ritual drama and catharsis, can also be understood as digital orality—an online space encoded by folk culture and racial ideology, and undergirded by a libidinal discursive economy, producing pungent, plaintive commentary on matters political.
André Brock
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781479820375
- eISBN:
- 9781479811908
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479820375.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This book addresses Black culture, Web 2.0, and social networks from new methodological perspectives. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the chapters within examine Black-designed ...
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This book addresses Black culture, Web 2.0, and social networks from new methodological perspectives. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the chapters within examine Black-designed digital technologies, Black-authored websites, and Black-dominated social media services such as Black Twitter. Distributed Blackness also features an innovative theoretical approach to Black digital practice. The book uses libidinal economy to examine Black discourse and Black users from a joyful/surplus perspective, eschewing deficit models (including respectability politics) to better place online Blackness as a mode of existing in the “postpresent,” or a joyous disregard for modernity and capitalism. This approach also adds nuanced analysis to the energies powering Black online activism and Black identity.Less
This book addresses Black culture, Web 2.0, and social networks from new methodological perspectives. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the chapters within examine Black-designed digital technologies, Black-authored websites, and Black-dominated social media services such as Black Twitter. Distributed Blackness also features an innovative theoretical approach to Black digital practice. The book uses libidinal economy to examine Black discourse and Black users from a joyful/surplus perspective, eschewing deficit models (including respectability politics) to better place online Blackness as a mode of existing in the “postpresent,” or a joyous disregard for modernity and capitalism. This approach also adds nuanced analysis to the energies powering Black online activism and Black identity.
Roshanak Kheshti
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479867011
- eISBN:
- 9781479861125
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479867011.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Chapter 5 discusses how the blurring of the lines between commerce, industry, and knowledge production has been the legacy of the world music culture industry. Desire and yearning for the sounds of ...
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Chapter 5 discusses how the blurring of the lines between commerce, industry, and knowledge production has been the legacy of the world music culture industry. Desire and yearning for the sounds of the other has helped to structure modern, so-called ultramodernist, and popular music forms in dynamic and aesthetic tension, continuing into the contemporary moment. This structure of desire has helped to train first-world listeners and music producers to listen for racialized gender and to structure their own listening subjectivity vis-à-vis, and often in opposition to, this alterity. But thanks to incorporation, the commodity chain has been delinked. The listener, now also in part the producer, aurally lays claim to sonic traditions and constitutes a key site of production. This chapter critically engages a long history of both Marxian and Freudian theorizing on fetishism in an effort to understand a recent shift to what I call the WMCI’s post-fetishization of traditional sounds, which coexists alongside the fetishism to which we’ve grown accustomed.Less
Chapter 5 discusses how the blurring of the lines between commerce, industry, and knowledge production has been the legacy of the world music culture industry. Desire and yearning for the sounds of the other has helped to structure modern, so-called ultramodernist, and popular music forms in dynamic and aesthetic tension, continuing into the contemporary moment. This structure of desire has helped to train first-world listeners and music producers to listen for racialized gender and to structure their own listening subjectivity vis-à-vis, and often in opposition to, this alterity. But thanks to incorporation, the commodity chain has been delinked. The listener, now also in part the producer, aurally lays claim to sonic traditions and constitutes a key site of production. This chapter critically engages a long history of both Marxian and Freudian theorizing on fetishism in an effort to understand a recent shift to what I call the WMCI’s post-fetishization of traditional sounds, which coexists alongside the fetishism to which we’ve grown accustomed.
